César Franck - Prélude, Aria et Final

- Composer: César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck (10 December 1822 -- 8 November 1890)
- Performer: Alfred Cortot
- Year of recording: 1929

Prélude, Aria et Final, for piano, M. 23, written in 1886-1887.

00:00 - I. Prélude. Allegro moderato e maestoso
08:43 - II. Aria. Lento
14:32 - III. Final. Allegro molto ed agitato

Franck's miserable teenage years as a reluctant virtuoso, prodded by his tyrannical father to work his way through countless grandes fantaisies for piano on operatic airs, evidently left him with a distaste for the piano as an object of composition. In any case, Franck's appointment in 1858 as organist at the new basilica of Sainte-Clotilde made him master of its splendid Cavaillé-Coll organ, to which he began to confide his choicest thoughts. It was not until the end of his life that he composed again for the piano, creating the Prélude, Choral et Fugue in 1884 for Marie Poitevin [uploaded on this channel], and its companion, the Prélude, Aria et Final, in 1886 and 1887 for the remarkable young pianist Léontine-Marie Bordes-Pène. The latter work is dedicated to Bordes-Pène, and she gave its first performance at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique on 12 May 1888.

- To Alfred Cortot (who made classic recordings of the Prélude, Aria et Final in 1929 and 1932), the Prélude's opening theme evoked a choir of angels by Piero della Francesca, hymning the nativity. Other commentators describe it fairly as a march, though the deportment of its serene gait conveys radiant aspiration -- we hear a maestoso soft thunder. Franck had enormous hands, and he asks, without comment, for the pianist to span a series of elevenths, and even a thirteenth, without evident discomfort -- a feat beyond the grasp of many. A second theme brings the inevitable note of anxiety and a development in which the first theme takes on a risoluto swagger. After a climax, a third theme, sostenuto e serioso, is introduced in bare octaves and immediately beset by masterful, rich contrapuntal involvements that weave an aura of sighing suspense and high drama before the first theme returns to end the Prélude with virile assertiveness. In all but name, this is a sonata first movement molded after the manner of Beethoven's last sonatas.
- After a 15-bar introduction, the Aria -- molto espressivo ma semplice -- makes its appearance, its melodic magic soon magnified in octaves, extrapolated in fluent legatissimo textures, and wrought to a rapt climax.
- Marked Allegro molto ed agitato, the Final begins with a harried chase in echoing octaves and octave volleys that scare up a chromatically wailing figure suggestive of demoniac possession. Heralded by an animato flourish of detached octaves in counterpoint, a carillon-like theme resounds in the instrument's central register, soon garlanded in triplets, to announce salvation. In good cyclic fashion, these themes blossom from germs and phrases in the preceding movements, and proceed to a great developmental struggle of light in darkness which is, at sublime length, resolved as the Prélude's opening theme and the Aria are woven together in silvery rapture.

The composition is dedicated "À Madame Bordes-Pène".